MyVerbalOutlet

I upgraded my VPS OS and everything seemed to go fine until I looked at my blog. Something seemed to have messed up the database so that revisions showed up on the blog. Nothing I did inside WordPress was able to fix it. I ended up restoring the database from a backup and that seems to have resolved the issue.

I did however lose one post and that is a real bummer. This whole thing was a real pain to deal with.

While researching an issue at work today I came across the NBuilder project which is a test data builder for .Net using C#. This is really cool as I having been searching for something like this. NBuilder has a really cool fluent interface for generating test data for use in unit tests.

Amazon and one of the largest book publishers got in a fight last weekend over what the pricing on ebooks should be and as a result Amazon stopped selling the publishers books directly and only allowed sales by third parties.  Buying books from Amazon is very convenient and they usually have the best price on new hardback books. Amazon’s pricing on new hardbacks has enabled me to order several  in the last few months that I would had to wait on paperback copies of otherwise. For this I love buying books from Amazon.

I have been an avid reader since the 6th grade; I love books. As someone who makes their living through technology I have been fascinated by ebooks and ebook readers. Amazon’s Kindle platform and Apple’s upcoming iPad are very cool devices. I however will not be using them as ebook readers anytime soon for several reasons.

1. I love books. I love holding a book in my hands.
2. I reread books I love. I have several series of books I have reread many times.
3. When I buy a book I own a physical copy and no one else can tell me what I can and cannot do with it.
4. I am not dependent on a third party corporation or reader to be able to read what I have purchased.

For ebooks to be attractive to me they would have to have the following attributes.

1. Be cheaper than the print books.
2. Be available within a reasonable time frame of the books release.
3. Be unencumbered by formats that restrict my use of the ebook on the platform of my choice.

Here are some articles with commentary by some of the authors that were effected by Amazon’s actions over the weekend.

Charles Stross: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html
Cory Doctorow: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/29/amazon-and-macmillan.html
John Scalzi: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/01/30/a-quick-note-on-ebook-pricing/

I listened to the Herding Code podcast number 69 today and it was bad. The guest Scott Bellware was ostensibly talking about the difficulties of working with what he called “HTML specialists” and everyone else calls designers. However he talked in such generalities and used such vague examples that he made no sense whatsoever for almost a half hour. Once he started talking a little less like a consultant trying to flim-flam his audience it almost became listenable. I hope in the future the Herding Code guys try and elicit more concrete examples from their guests instead of letting them ramble on.

Today is the big Apple press event where all the rumors say Apple will be introducing a tablet computing device. What I am hoping to see is iPhone OS 4 and an updated iLife suite of software. I am reserving judgement on the tablet until I see Steve Jobs demo it.